I have to say, Morlock, you certainly are an affable chap. It seems like we are all trying to dissuade you from your goal!
Hey, good advice is good advice. I'm never opposed to being talked
out of working.
did you ever encounter 2e D&D psionics? Now that was a unique system.
2e was the last system I mastered, if you don't count all the option stuff (aka 2.5). But I am ashamed to admit, I can't recall anything about 2e psionics. I think I owned the book, but that was going on 30 years ago. I want to say they were presented much like spells, in that there was a big list of them that looked a lot like spell descriptions. But that's about it.
It might even give them a bit more of a niche and cool flavour - take away components from their spells, or make them simple utterances of their will rather than proper spells, like "Eat fire, gobbo scum!" as the fireball launches or "come, break bread with me" or whatever for charm person, operating kind of like a Kiai shout in martial arts - the power is in the focus of the utterance, not the exact words; or gathering and releasing energy kind of gestures like those airbender guys rather than precise rune tracing and ley line plucking. Leave the ancient esoteric crap to the wizards and channel raw power, baby!
I see them doing it all. Psionic-y wizards, who go all zen and commit their knowledge to writing, leaving vast libraries for students; psionic-y sorcerers, who are more like Jedi, in that they're mystics, too, but not so academic about it - somewhere between the cerebral and the visceral; psionic-y wild talents, who are all viscera. The wizards have the widest array of powers to choose from, and get more of them, but they sacrifice the depth that other practitioners can apply to their less numerous powers, and the amount of spell points they can throw around. The sorcerers have a more middling selection of powers, and get fewer of them, but they get to fully exploit those powers and get more spell points (they spend more time focusing their chi or whatever, as opposed to exploring new abilities). The wild talents get the fewest powers, but they get tons of spell points to spam them with, and can really explore every facet of the powers they do have.
But really, in terms of setting I conceptualize all "adepts" or "practitioners" or what have you as being a single class; the people who can tap into "the force" or magic or psionics. They might fall into "traditions" like in WW's Mage series, but they're all doing fundamentally the same thing. I also like the idea of splitting off the effects that logically imply some kind of animating intelligence into a "summoning" category. Stuff that seems a bit far out can be explained by the adept calling a normally incorporeal or extradimensional being to act as proxy.
Your kiai thing is as good a defense of verbal components as I've seen. Incidentally, I've always been into the "voice" school, and was disappointed not to find a d20 prestige class that works like Saruman, or those with the "voice" in Dune.
Another approach I'd consider would be a Monk subclass. Sorry, I don't have a cool name for it.
That reminds me, the monk
really works for the setting I'm writing up, I'll have to de-un-person it. I usually keep the monk out of sight and out of mind, because I find it so out of place in my preferred D&D milieu.
Anyway, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to substitute spells/powers with a psionic theme for the abilities listed under the "Way of Four Elements" subclass. Write up a list, use the rules for Ki to power the abilities, assign level requirements, and you're pretty much finished.
Thanks for the tip, it sounds like maybe something you want for the "psychic warrior" type?
You would need to create a bunch of new "spells" to fill out the powers though. I would also build in a requirement that for each spell you get you must have already have a spell one level lower in that area (telepath, telekintist, empath, clairvoyant, medium, precog, pyrokinetic, whatever-you-call-the strength-enhancement-guy, etc) to enforce a theme while still allowing variety. The sorcery points fit well mechanically too, though I would probably add some psi-specific ones.
My plan is to match up every power (from UP for sure, from other sources maybe) with a 5e spell, then take a look at converting each UP power that doesn't have a 5e equivalent, and altering the 5e spells when I like the UP power better.
Edit: I was in the process of copy-pasting UP powers into text files and cleaning them up to be used in Indesign, but since this thread I stopped. Point is, I was about halfway through with the job and UP was on track for just over 400 powers. I did a quick and dirty check of a 5e spell list (including all published material, not just PHB), and 5e had almost exactly the same number of spells, somewhere between 400 and 410.
